DEANNA HEATH: Joining the Adult Orphans Club

Recently, while attending the funeral for a friend’s mother, I realized that my friend had just joined a very difficult club. Her father had died some time ago, and now her mother was gone. That made my friend a newly minted member of the Adult Orphans Club, a tough situation to be sure.

Of course the death of a parent is almost always traumatic. Our first relationships are, after all, with our parents. From the time we learn about death, the notion that our parents might die brings a primal fear. We expect that, in the ordinary course of things, to outlive our parents.

But transitioning to a person without parents is in fact a double loss. We’ve lost the individual parent. And we’ve lost the experience of having parents in our lives. We’re now an adult orphan.

Significant impact

The effect of this is not often recognized by those who have not been through it.

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First of all, we’ve lost the feeling of being parented. Most of us who have good relationships with parents have a lifelong habit of depending on them for advice and support. All that goes away with the death of the second parent. Sure, you can get support from spouses, friends, and others. But it’s not the same as the kind of bond that you have with the people who were with you from the very start.

We deal with fresh realizations when our last parent dies. The earlier generation is gone. I’m the oldest person in the family, looked up to as such by children and grandchildren.

We often have greater awareness of the value and importance of other family relationships. We may even feel jealousy and resentment toward people whose parents are still living.

Other losses as well

Besides the loss of the second parent, becoming an adult orphan can bring with it other losses.

The death of the second parent removes a chunk of your personal heritage. Your parents – who have been there from the very start – are no longer there to answer questions about your early life or family history.

That’s especially hard because this event often causes a strong desire to dredge up the past, to replay the story of your life with your parents, to reflect on difficult memories and hard times, and to reassess your whole life as it relates to your parents.

If you had left your hometown in prior years, leaving your parents behind, their deaths may now sever your connection with the place where you grew up: a key part of your past and heritage.

You may also lose support of a more tangible kind when you become an adult orphan. Sometimes parents have been a financial safety net for your entire life. Even if you never actively drew upon this support, you are now called upon to walk on your own knowing that the safety net is no longer there.

And, with the death of the second parent, it’s not uncommon for other family relationships to fray and even fail. Sometimes the parents were the glue that held sibling relationships together. And, unfortunately, sometimes quarrels break out over estate or inheritance issues, which sadly tend to bring out the worst in people.

On the other hand, if your relationship with the parent was difficult, you may actually feel relief: “Thank God I won’t get those angry phone calls anymore.” This often couples with profound sadness because the death of the parent brings with it the death of the hope, which even abused and neglected children often feel, that the relationship with the parent can someday be repaired or improved. That can make the loss doubly hard.

And the death of parents can be liberating in another way (though you won’t see it like this in the beginning). Free from concerns of caregiving for elderly or ailing parents, you’ll be able to do things that you’d put on hold.

Time is the key

Recovering from the death of the second parent and settling into membership in the Adult Orphans Club comes gradually with time. But it does come.

It’s important to focus your energies and resources on positive things for you, your family, and your life. It’s also important to recognize and be supportive of other people joining that club, to be keenly conscious of the special significance of the loss of the second parent, and to be needed, and to render support is the best therapy you can give yourself.

Deanna Heath, LMSW is the owner of Mt. Pleasant Counseling and can be reached at 989-572-0246 or emailed at Deanna@mtpleasantcounseling.com. For more information on this subject, she recommends the book “Always Too Soon: Voices of Support for Those Who Have Lost Both Parents” by Allison Gilbert. This includes essays by Roseanne Cash, Yogi Berra, Geraldine Ferraro, Ice T, and others, about their experience and their suggestions for coping.